I use techniques to manage group density and dynamics during Brainzooming collaborations that remain unnamed. Then, out of the blue one day, I happen to call them something. Once named, they turn into analogies. That leads to imagining new ways to employ them since applying analogies always takes me to new ideas.
One example? What I now call Musical Chairing.
Musical chairs is a game where there is always one participant more than the number of available chairs. You play music, and when it stops in each round, participants scramble to find a chair. The person who can’t reach a chair is eliminated, and the next round begins. Musical chairs is definitely a game of elimination where the field of play gets smaller and denser.
While facilitating a large, in-person community strategy collaboration for a local church, parish leaders had no clear count for the expected number of attendees. Since we never want to run out of resources and activities for everyone, I designed and planned for eighty participants, the hoped for attendance.
That morning, we welcomed perhaps forty adults and a few kids. We clearly had:
Surveying the large space, I eliminated participant options on multiple fronts:
I realized during the morning that I was managing group dynamics as if it were musical chairs. I was, in effect, taking away places to sit down and getting everyone closer together to maximize collaboration. The goal? Ensuring everyone had something to do without too many options for what they’d work on or who their collaborators would be (or not).
After applying the musical chairs framework, I explored other possibilities for creating greater density among participants. In subsequent online and hybrid Blast! collaborations, I’ve noticed how I manage comparable dynamics, but with twists for online density:
Of course, there’s also the “Stephanie Welsh gambit,” named after a dear friend and Brainzooming collaborator. Steph likes to keep everybody together at the start of a Blast! to generate a bunch of ideas very quickly within one virtual space.
Facilitating the Musical Chairs of Group Dynamics
If you facilitate groups of any size, we recommend:
If you’re interested in ideas for creating wildly productive in-person or virtual collaboration, let’s talk. We have all kinds of ideas to share! – Mike Brown